


In the End

by chicagoartnerd



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: M/M, Reichenbach Falls
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-01-04
Updated: 2012-01-04
Packaged: 2017-10-28 21:54:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,878
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/312575
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/chicagoartnerd/pseuds/chicagoartnerd
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>His plan had been brilliant. He would "die" and would burn Moriarty's network from the inside out one pawn at a time. But John had ruined it. Gone and ruined everything by doing something so human. So stupidly, excruciatingly, human. Now he was gone. And none of it mattered any more.</p>
            </blockquote>





	In the End

**Author's Note:**

> Oh God some one please stop me from writing Reichenbach angst. I shouldn't be doing this it hurts too much. DX I literally started crying through this. Don't mind me I'll be over here in the corner with my emotions. *weeps quietly*

 

 _“I love you.”_

 _  
_

What did it mean? What did those three words really mean? Could they really encompass everything that twined them together, bound them in eternal companionship? The giggles at crime scenes, the mugs of tea, the fluttering eyelids as his fingers danced over the cords of his violin, the sleepless nights on the tails of crimes and criminals.

Did all of their lives together really compact down to those three words?

They were the last words John said to him and felt wrong. Wrong because they weren’t nearly enough. Even now they couldn’t be. It wasn’t supposed to end this way.

It had been a sham, it was meant to be his greatest con but it had been too brilliant. Too convincing that John behaved irrationally, behaved unexpectedly. He hadn’t anticipated. He didn’t understand. Would he ever understand?

Perhaps now, now of all times he was starting to see what it meant.

\-------------------------------------

 

“You know exactly how this ends darling. Should I make it easier for you?”

 

The grin on Moriarty’s face glowed fiercely in the overcast light of the London skyline. 

He didn’t respond simply lunged.

Moriarty’s laugh was mad dash and cut through the air around them as they grappled on the top of the Reichenbach Financial Building. He felt the shot he knew was coming rip through his jacket where his left lung was and embed itself in the Kevlar he was wearing under his overcoat. And the animal behind his eyes howled in triumph as a shot straight to his solar plexus sent Sherlock falling, bloodied and broken, through the air.

Falling to meet his demise at the hands of Jim Moriarty.

Of course it had been part of his plan. He had Mycroft’s help in this endeavor and had gotten rather good at faking deaths thanks to Irene.

But as he dropped through space he heard his name. Louder and more frantic than he had ever heard it said before by a voice he had heard every day. Suddenly the plan seemed so idiotic.

John was not meant to be there for his fall. Was not meant to see him bloodied and loaded in to a body bag while the police held him screaming back. He wasn’t supposed to almost ruin the whole thing by calling back to him that everything was alright, that it was a trap.

John was meant to get his video message after the fall but he must have discovered it earlier. When the doors to the ambulance closed and one of Mycroft’s people, Ann something? Unzipped the bag he immediately went for his phone. He had seven new texts from the same number. John.

And one voice mail.

The texts were panicked but the voice that greeted him when he pressed play was dead calm. It was the voice of a solider set in a mission he knew he wasn’t coming back from. His stomach turned to cold stones and seawater. He finished listening to it and immediately turned to Mycroft’s assistant, panicked, to tell her to call Mycroft immediately; he had to stop him. But before he could warn her her phone buzzed and she looked vaguely surprised before answering it.

 

“Yes? I see. No. Yes we’ll proceed to check point one any way. I think he already knows.”

 

No. **No.**

But he couldn’t stop his mind from churning out the scene of it before his eyes. Playing it like some twisted parody of an action hero film.

\---------------------------------------

 

John approached Moriarty, his Browning cocked and drawn. He stood there completely vacant, a dull smile plastered on his reptilian features.

 

“Did you see it Johnny boy? Your boyfriend was so lovely playing Icarus today. Too bad he flew too close. Silly boy.”

 

His laughter was a high bark and ended with a coo,

 

“Go on John dearest shoot me, or try too. Can you feel the heat of those little red dots on the back of your chest? They burn a little don’t they?”

 

John stopped and pressed the barrel of the gun to his temple and smiled coolly,

 

“I’m not going to shoot you. That would be too good for you. That’s the death of a rapid dog.”

 

Moriarty laughed in his face and jerked in close to John’s ear in a flash,

 

“Really? That was the death I gave little Sherly. How little you think of your dead love, how heartless of you. I’d be lying if I didn’t admit it was kind of hot.”

 

John’s teeth clamped down but his hands and eyes did not waver even a fraction,

 

“I’m not going to shoot you but I am going to shoot him.”

 

And suddenly John’s shoulder was in Jim’s chest and he was twisting away from him to shoot behind his shoulder at the sniper he knew was waiting there.

There was the sound of the shot and then nothing, no more red sights set on any one.

Then Moriarty was on top of him with a snarl as he crushed his throat with shocking strength. He went to snap his neck but John used his legs to flip him and seemed to have the upper hand before he bit down on his arm and used John’s surprise and pain to push him back over the ledge.

But John was too quick to find a handhold and suddenly both of them were going over the side of Reichenbach Financial.

But unlike Sherlock they didn’t have a planned landing spot and technicians to help them if anything went awry. They hit the water and it might have well have been solid concrete. There was a crush and a white splash, neither resurfaced.

\-----------------------------------------

He could see it all.

He knew he was right.

That is exactly what happened but he didn’t look at the assistant to confirm it or even Mycroft when they reached the checkpoint. For once in his life he wasn’t seeing, or observing, or thinking about much of anything. He was numb.

So this was what it felt like. Loss.

True abhorrent loss of a part of you that was underappreciated, a part of you that you didn’t understand, the most beautiful and important part of you was dead. This is why loving was a disadvantage.

If John hadn’t loved him he wouldn’t have…..No.

That wasn’t right.

If Sherlock had loved him right, had felt it sooner, had admitted to feeling any thing for the unassuming man with steel resolve and the most brilliant smile he could have stopped him. God he would never see that smile or hear him giggle with him again.

Never.

People didn’t go to an afterlife, they were dissected, cataloged, burned, and decomposed in the earth and water. John was gone.

It felled him like a well-placed blow to the throat and he was on the ground gasping for air. He wasn’t sure what the rest of his body was doing but his eyes burned and bled searing hot liquid down his face. The tears were quiet or so he first thought before he heard the murmurings of pity around him and realized Mycroft, his assistant, and the rest of his staff were watching him break down on the ground outside a warehouse.

He tried to straighten up and wipe his face with some semblance of control but failed and simply stumbled and avoided all of the sad eyes that awaited him.

 

“I’ve informed Mrs. Hudson of what has happened but the rest of the world thinks you’re both dead. I thought it might be prudent in case Moriarty’s organization saw fit to retaliate.”

 

He heard him but the words meant nothing. He simply kept looking far and away, eyes focusing on nothing, truly not registering anything about his surroundings. If you’d asked him where he was he truly wouldn’t have been able to tell you.

That hurt.

Everything hurt and he hated it. When he didn’t respond he saw movement out of the corner of his eye and Mycroft was now standing directly next to him. His voice was quieter and he spoke slowly, as if to a small, frightened child,

 

“Sherlock. If you get in the car it will return you to Baker Street. It’s for the best.”

 

And suddenly he saw incendiary white and grabbed Mycroft viciously by his perfectly pressed shirt collar,

 

“Don’t you ever. **EVER.** Say this was for the best. I.will.kill.you.”

 

And then he had let him go with a shove and blindly stumbled in to the waiting car. Not registering if there was any one with him. Not caring. Nothing mattered any more.

He wandered up the stairs to 221B in a stupor and fell down on the couch, bumping his hip painfully but not caring enough to really register it had hurt. He curled up around his phone and played the voice mail over and over again before dropping off in to a feverish dreamless sleep.

\--------------------------------------------

 

“John!”

 

He jolted awake but the only sound that greeted him was the hollow hum of the fridge in the kitchen and the creaking of the old flat around him.

No.

It couldn’t be real.

And suddenly he was on his feet stumbling up the stairs to John's room.

Empty.

Shaking he pressed the replay on his voice mail and heard his voice in that final calm message,

 

“Sherlock you’re a great bloody idiot. You better not be dead. Because if you are I will find a way to bring you back and kill you again. How could you? What are you? Nevermind. Stupid question. I am coming for you. One way or another.”

 

And then quieter, so much more quiet than it should have been as he pressed it, keening, to his ear,

 

 _“I love you.”_

 

No.

It was real but he didn’t want it to be. Needed it not to be.

But Sherlock Holmes was a rational man. Cold hard logic had been his bosom friend and sole companion for most of his life….before John. Why did this hurt so much?

It didn’t make sense. Nothing made sense any more.

This is what it felt like to be human. He hated it. No wonder people were constantly killing each other and themselves. It was miserable. He just wanted to sleep.

He was sitting on the edge of John's bed somehow. He scrunched up and shoved his face in one of John’s pillows. It smelled like his jumpers did, like his aftershave, like his heady sweat.

It smelled like home.

He didn’t let his brain run the amount of days it would take before John’s scent evaporated from every surface in the flat. Before the last of John’s sloughed off skin cells completely decomposed and left the world truly empty of any physical traces he had ever existed in Sherlock’s life.

He willed himself in to an empty sleep clutching pillows and duvets like they might materialize in to the man he needed now so badly.

\-------------------------------------------------

 _3 years later….._

\-------------------------------------------------

Mycroft had warned him extensively that the Sherlock he had left on that overcast day three years ago had disappeared.

That he wouldn’t like the thing that had replaced him in the flat that they had once shared on Baker Street.

To which John had first responded that he had changed as well. Spending three years as a black ops killer systematically destroying the dregs of Moriarty’s network had left him jagged like an old razor.

He was more distant and quieter, perfectly unassuming and entirely deadly. Mycroft had turned him in to the kind of hit man the army had only ever had wet dreams of. A silent crack shot, in and out, target completely erased with no trace.

The second thing he had said to Mycroft on the subject had been, “Fuck off.”

And so he climbed the steps to 221B slowly and deliberately and used his old key to open it carefully. It was much the same state of chaos that he had left it in except everything was dustier, covered in an invasive level of grime and filth.

He stepped inside and was about to call out to see if he was home when the sound of a chair scraping in the kitchen made him turn around and meet the confused blue gaze of Sherlock Holmes.

His eyes were glassy and unfocused as well as sunken in to the purple bruises that were his eye sockets. His cheekbones and the bones in his neck stretched the flesh over them so tight it looked like they were rubbing it pink and raw from the inside. His hair was no longer a deep and shiny brown but had instead gone ashen, a faded black and gray just like the rest of him and the flat.

He looked like one of the emaciated corpses he had always been so fond of.

 

“Sherlock?”

 

He hadn’t meant to speak but he had been too stunned by the faded thing in front of him to stop it.

The cruel smile that graced those now nonexistent pale lips looked physically painful to make.

 

“I’ve never had hallucinations that talked with this solution before. How disturbing.”

 

And suddenly John was rushing forward towards him.

He hesitated briefly before embracing him and had to fight the urge to squeeze too hard. He was so thin. So thin, fragile, and heartwrenchingly broken.

 

“I’m not a hallucination.”

 

He didn’t move simply stood there and let John hug him before John felt the rumble of that deep voice in his now cavernous chest,

 

“You feel so real. And God you even smell like him. So warm. John.”

 

He whispered the last bit as he buried his face in John’s neck and he had to fight the urge to pull him to his chest tighter.

 

“Sherlock I’m not a hallucination, illusion, or ghost. I didn’t die. I spent the last few years destroying any trace of Moriarty left in this world. If you don’t believe me text Mycroft.”

 

He stopped carding his hands through John’s short hair at this and pulled back from the embrace enough to see his eyes properly.

 

“No. No that’s not possible this has to be….John?”

 

The last part was so small and light that he almost didn’t register it but when he did he smiled, brilliant and wide and true,

 

“Sherlock.”

 

Those dead blue eyes roared to burning life and suddenly they were searching his face, his neck, every inch of him they could reach from their perch in his face. He felt Sherlock deducing every inch of him and it felt marvelous.

It felt like home.

And then Sherlock’s hand was back in his hair, his skeletal fingers danced over the new hard lines in his forehead. He then pulled John in closer to him and his arms came up to grip his back, holding on so fiercely that John let out a small gasp of surprise.

 

“I didn’t understand. Didn’t think I was capable of it but now I do. Don’t ever leave me like that again. Ever. Not even if you have a reason. And don’t ever say those words to me again.”

 

John looked up confused. What had he just said? He tried to reel back in the conversation but Sherlock, even drugged half to death could see he was bewildered and leaned in, lips ghosting over his ear,

 

“Don’t ever say you love me again. That word is not nearly enough for what this feeling is. I hate the inadequacy of it.”

 

And suddenly John was laughing because it was mad, it was all mad, and perfect and beautiful and God help him he had missed it and this man.

So very much.

 

“Okay. I won’t. I’ll come up with some other way to say what it means. But only because you’re upset by it. Is there any way I can make it up to you?”

 

Sherlock gave him a withering glare and then stomped over to the half ripped to pieces couch and flopped down in a plume of dust.

 

“You could start by making me tea.”

 

The pout in it forced another laugh from his lungs as he rummaged in the mess until he found the kettle, still laughing,

 

“I’m going to regret asking that aren’t I?”

 

He sat up on the couch, still looking like death’s attractive younger brother, but much more alive some how,

 

“Oh most definitely.”

 

John simply shook his head and smiled.

He had missed this so much. So much so it had killed him nearly every day he had been away. In fact it really had. Parts of him that had been deadened and frozen away had started to thaw as soon as he saw Sherlock pout on that couch.

It was good to be back. It was good to be home.

It wasn’t perfect and things were more than a bit not good now but they would manage. They had each other to lean on after all.

The teapot let out its shrill whistle and he brought him a cuppa in one of the only semi-clean mugs.

Everything would be fine.

Well as fine as it could be between an army doctor/ black ops hit man and a heroine addicted, sociopathic, consulting detective.

They would manage. They always did.


End file.
